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Post-digital Works from the Collection of the Central Bank of Hungary

Night Eyes, an exhibition of the Central Bank of Hungary’s art collection, featuring works by emerging artists, focuses on one of the most influential artistic trends of recent years, the post-digital movement. The members of Generation Y are also known as digital natives, a term popularised by Marc Prensky, because they are the ones who have literally been born into the world of computers, the internet and social media, which has not only changed their social relationships but also their perception of reality. In addition to the material world, the digital medium and the internet have become their community space and natural visual environment, and as artists they also fundamentally base their work on this.

Online reproductions of analogue artefacts are often disconnected not only from their spatiality, but also from their cultural and historical context. The resulting visual signals can be used and rearranged without any hierarchy or framework, and now the digital reproduction of the artwork is therefore just as important as the tangible object itself.

The five artists featured here employ different strategies to balance the digital and analogue worlds. They design their work partly or entirely using digital technologies, which they then create using analogue imaging methods. Some of them explore printing techniques, the reproducibility of images, the question of original and copy, others, the relationship between man and machine. While some – perhaps because of the alienating, sterile nature of the digital dimension, or perhaps because of the rise of artificial intelligence in imaging – seek to leave a personal imprint, which they also do in a variety of ways. Sometimes with the performative gestures of abstract expressionism, sometimes with visual diary-like representations of personal stories and biographical elements. Occasionally, they use the titles to sneak in a narrative on their canvases, that are linked to the neo-abstract painterly trend.

The Night Eyes exhibition, which borrows its title from Martin Góth’s work of the same title, runs parallel with the Code + Canvas show in the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin.

 

Kinga Hamvai, Zsuzska Petró